Major Dude
Though I would never have predicted it from the six pound puppy I met for the first time in October of 1998, Hopbook’s Jake Deezle grew up to be a major dude. His father, Tweedeldum Brookland Savoy, was, in his day in the late 90’s, the most successful Labrador Retriever stud in the country, meaning he had produced more champions than any other lab sire. Savoy did not like the show ring. The word on him was that he “throws better than he shows,” a way of saying that while he had no AKC championship designation after his name, he was a superior sire.
Our Jake won his AKC conformation championship by the time was three. Unlike his father, Jake seemed to like the show ring; he was a great performer. He possessed perfect lines, a great stance, and he always looked happy in competition, head high, eyes bright, tail wagging.
Jake was raised in a family with another dog, a truly crazy older bitch, Sasha, our first dog. Sasha had the dog equivalent of a nervous breakdown when she was about five, and was a patient of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Behavior Clinic for the rest of her life. She was an early dog user of Prozac, which helped her control her impulses, and her tendency to guard the real estate around her on a couch or bed by snarling or biting. Jake tolerated Sasha, knew the degree to which he could engage with her. He was a member of her pack, but too easy-going himself to ever want to challenge her. He was cool. Nothing phased him. He grew up to be a truly great dog.
Jake is the puppy you wanted to wake up to on Christmas morning as a kid, the dog you saw yourself whistling for on long walks through fields of wheat grass you imagined waving through the perfect version of your crummy, dog-less adolescence, the dog you wanted in your city apartment who would wait endlessly for you, never have accidents, and always keep you safe. He is the dog you wanted in bed with you on extremely cold nights, the dog you wanted to swim with on a perfect day in the Adirondacks, the proud face who leaned into the wind on the prow of the motorboat you took upriver to your favorite swimming spot, the companion you took without hesitation to the summit of a mountain. He would not quit and he would never complain.
In our real world of city living, Jake was our walking companion, our head-on-lap-DVD- watching-book-reading-couch-potato-sidekick. He slept in our bedroom, came into bed in the morning to lick us awake. He was our ball player, our dock diver, our stick carrier. He was our foot warmer, our grandchild pillow, our sideshow performer. He was a trickster. He was a stealer — of food and of hearts. He was loyal and brave. Once, when a nasty, chained Bearded Collie broke its restraint and attacked Diane, knocking her down, Jake came to her defense, chasing the other dog away, and biting its lip to show he meant business. It was his only fight, a decisive victory. Other dogs seemed to know not to mess with him though he never showed the slightest hint of aggression.
Jake is dying of lymphoma now. His body and intestines are riddled with tumors. He has had two courses of chemo-therapy but the cancer did not remit. He can no longer keep food down. He is fading before our eyes.
I wish we could talk to each other. We do communicate, of that I am certain, but I would like him to know how stellar he is, how much fun it has been to have him in our lives. I wish there was a way to comfort him, though I recognize that he may not need or desire it, certainly does not understand it in exactly the way I mean him to. The vet tech who draws his blood told me to remember that he does not know he is sick. I think she is wrong. I think we often give dogs less credit than they deserve. I think he knows things. Whatever is in his breeding that makes his response to his decline less dramatic than my response to it – the instinct to shuck signs of pain to fool his pack into thinking he is healthy so they will not turn him out or turn on him, the bred-out shock reflex that allows retrievers to plunge into freezing water to rescue shipwrecked sailors – this breed of domesticated dog is a human creation as much as a natural one, and his intelligence is partly in his ability to respond to his creators with a kind of equanimity that is, at times, clearly in opposition to any reasonable definition self preservation. I wish now I was sure we did right by him trying to prolong his life medically, trying to reduce whatever pain we assumed he felt.
Eleven years is a relatively short time in a human life, less, these days, than one seventh. I have been pretty much beside myself for weeks, weepy and sad, grieving already for him in his decline, knowing how short a time he has left, how hard it will be for me when he is gone. I have said only partly in jest, that I like this dog a lot better than I like a lot of people. He’s a trooper, schlepped to vets and hospitals for tests and treatments. For blood tests, they draw from his jugular, and he licks the techs’ faces while they are stabbing him in the throat with needles. As close to death as he is, he still gleams like a shiny bright bear. Through all his sickness in the last few months he has wagged his tail and licked our faces, has eaten with intermittent gusto though his weight has dropped precipitously, has chased the ball when was feeling up to it, has annoyingly and surprisingly continued to hump our other dog, Stella, after his walks. The vet told us that at some point he would simply stop eating, stop being continent, but that his heart would not stop. There is, we were told, rarely a dignified home death for dogs with cancer. Allowed to go on, they starve themselves, dehydrate, and die painfully. We will not allow that. Yet it is nearly impossible to contemplate his exit. How can he be leaving us so soon?
Posted 12/22/09
Jake Deezel, 9/14/98 – 12/24/09.